Studio 2A: Building Design and Techniques

Studio 2A: Building Design and Techniques focuses on developing a critical thinking about a wide set of situations concerning the built environment through reflective architectural expressions and demonstrations that propose an ingenious approach to technology, materials and context. We believe that context, materials and technology are fundamental axioms of the architectural formation.

Paired with critical thinking about cultural, economic and environmental settings and through their mutual interaction, great works of architecture can emerge. The goal of the studio is to promote architectural quality while also cultivating cunning thoughts about conditions that globally and locally offer both, problems and opportunities for architects to act.

In pursuing the goal, the studio aims towards regaining a larger control of the different aspects of the building process and relationship to its context in such a way that critical thinking and building aesthetics and structure can perform symbiotically. On one scale the development of new materials, technologies and structures has resulted in a diversity of architectural expressions, creating a distance to some of the core values of architecture, such as inhabitable and meaningful spaces for people. On another, buildings and infrastructures are increasingly being treated in isolation from their context generating harmful consequences for cultures and environments.

The intention is that the studio should question the gaps that these scenarios open by developing critical and sensitive proposals that consider fundamental elements of architecture: material culture, space, theory, history, structure, phenomena, context, and inhabitation.

The studio is anchored within Teaching Programme 2 and relates to the specific focus area of habitation. Studio 2A relates to the overall vision of the school Engaging Through Architecture by addressing current architectural matters of relevance to society. In practice, engaging into local as well as national challenges of the built environment. Also, the studio encourages studies that enable candidates to gain maximum influence as future practicing architect, thus establishing close relations to practice as well as participating in current architectural debates.